Why Benedict would have stopped John Paul going to see Bob Dylan

At the time he gritted his teeth and sat it out. But now Pope Benedict XVI has admitted that he thought his predecessor's encounter with the singer Bob Dylan was a lousy idea.

In 1997, John Paul II sat on a stage along with 50 cardinals in a vast fairground outside Bologna while slightly below and in front of him, Bob Dylan, wearing a cowboy hat and rhinestone-spangled zoot suit, crunched his way through "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", "It's a Hard Rain" and "Forever Young".

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After the second song Dylan ascended to the Pope's throne, doffed the hat, Nashville Skyline-style, and shook his hand.

The Pope then preached a sermon to the 300,000-strong audience. How many roads must a man walk down? "Just one," declared the Pope. What answer is blowing in the wind? "The breath and voice of the Spirit," he insisted, "a voice that calls and says, 'Come'."

At the time the event was seen as one of the more brilliant publicity stunts by the most publicity-savvy pope that ever lived. But in a book published this week, Benedict XVI, the late pope's theological adviser, reveals that he thought the whole thing a very bad idea. "The Pope arrived [at the Bologna Eucharist Congress] tired, worn out," he writes in My Beloved Predecessor. "Just at that moment Bob Dylan, the 'star' of the young, and others whose names I do not recall, turned up. They had a message completely different from that to which the Pope was committed. There was reason to be sceptical - which I was, and in a certain sense still am - to doubt whether it was really right to involve 'prophets' of this type."

Pope Benedict's admission is no surprise. A pianist who relaxes by playing Bach and Mozart, he has made no attempt to hide his dislike of the church's use of pop music to ingratiate itself with the young. Last year he called for an end to electric guitars and modern music in church and a return to traditional music. "The liturgy is not a theatrical text, and the altar is not a stage," he said. He has described "great mass gatherings" of pop fans as "a kind of cult, at odds with the cult of Christianity". He quietly cancelled the Vatican's annual Christmas pop concert.

Gerald O'Connell, an expert on Vatican affairs, commented: "I think the difference in their approaches comes from their very different life experiences. John Paul II went camping and canoeing with young people. He enjoyed singing round the campfire when he was at university. It's a question of different sensitivies. It's a sign of honesty in Benedict that he reveals this." But it is also part of a more general turning away from pop culture on the part of the church - in part a reaction to criticisms of Western materialism by prominent Muslims.

When Lou Reed, Alanis Morissette and the Eurythmics starred at a May Day concert attended by the Pope in his jubilee year, the bishop in charge, Fernando Charrier, said: "Do not be astonished. Rock is an expression of today's world, particularly dear to the young. All [forms of] human expression, when they have dignity, command respect. I do not believe there has ever existed a [form of] rock that is diabolical."

But with the condemnation of the materialist, consumption-mad West by Islamic writers in recent years, the church has had a rethink. "Something we should all give up, not just for Lent but for good," said the National Catholic Register last month, is "the excesses of pop culture ... Our first duty is to opt out of the aspects of pop culture that have become so debased ... The arts have become a cesspool."

If Benedict is a fogey, he is in good company. Meanwhile, his Bobness has only happy memories of Bologna. "That show was one of the best I ever played in my whole life," he said.